Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Well, you'd be right on the number of boxes. There're a LOT more than six.

But here's a blog about 6 things we've done in the last two weeks.

And it just so happens my friend Daniel helped me build 6 (how title-worthy!) shelving units for my food storage. Now I'm organizing. Soon you will see "after" photos, both of the living space above and the newly filled shelving units below.

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Bridgette has been sleeping well through the nights with very few accidents. I wanted to take her to the Redwood Forests of California this week (note: I'm not there... I'm at home writing this blog entry), so we tested our mettle in her first backyard camp out!

We had a star party and read books and played with flashlights and attempted to sleep.

(Bridgette has been pretending to watch rocket ships travel to the sun with a telescope ever since.)

The camp out was successful! (For several hours . . .)

We beat Jeff's prediction of coming in at 10PM and made it all the way to 11:30.

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Ancestry.com Summer Party!

Bridgette, Kelly, Heidi, Ellie

I may have mentioned this once or twice, but Bridgette & Ellie are pretty good friends.

Different stages of jumping . . .

Bridgette was fearless in the water. Which was awesome. And somewhat unnerving.

At the bottom of this slide, we both went under.

Me: Bridgette! (*splutter*splutter*) Was that fun?

Bridgette: (*spluttering too*) Yeah!

Me: Want to go again?

Bridgette: No!

Little Miss Independent

And a few times around the lazy river . . .

Just we girls being swept away.

Watched Tangled on the big screen from the pool. Home at 11:30. What a night!

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This is my daughter with Jimmer Fredette.

Nuf said.

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Bridgette has a couple of serious interests at the moment.

First is space.

She can tell you that Mercury is very hot during the day and very cold at night. She knows that we live on Earth and that Venus has no water. She'll tell you that Jupiter is made of gas and has a great red spot. She knows that Uranus is tipped on its side, that the moon is made of rock, and that Pluto is icy. She will tell you that Saturn's rings are made of ice particles.

(Oh hey! This is funny! Yesterday I had a cup of ice at the doctor's office and she asked me for some ice particles...)

Another one of her current interests is the human body.

I have this chart on my wall and she asks to look at it every day. She knows the location of her femur, her ribs, her skull, and her brain inside her skull.

So I busted out my Barron's Anatomy Flash Cards. She loves them. (So do I! And I highly recommend them as educational tools to those interested.)

Not surprisingly, she was fascinated by the detailed cards on the digestive system.

But her favorite body parts right now are veins. She likes to find the veins in her own body and is happy to point them out in yours.

She knows that veins carry blood, but in order to really help her understand, I took her with me to my Red Cross blood donation Saturday.

The workers pulled a chair up, so she could lean over and watch them stick me. She was very intent. She wanted to donate too, but alas, she's too small. :) They did give her a matching red bandage though.

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Drills!

I'm participating in/helping organize two emergency exercises coming up in less than a month.

The first happens on Saturday, September 10. It's a county-wide medical-surge coordination involving all 7 hospitals in the area. They will practice evacuating and treating 250 patients.

My part is small in that drill. I agreed to help round up 250 patients, so I've been encouraging my past/present/future BYU students to play as well as some other groups of students/actors I know. I'm going to an all day class in SLC to learn moulage (wound make-up) and will apply moulage to the patients that morning from 7-9AM. Then I will participate with the Medical Reserve Corps, probably leading a triage team at one of the hospitals.

There are a lot of agencies participating that day. It should be interesting.

The second happens on Monday, September 12 (very close on the heels of the first). That's the annual Lindon City Drill. I'm the lead planner for that one, and we're adding several new components this year, so there are some pieces to coordinate still. I'm lucky to work with a lot of very good volunteers on this drill. Everyone of them plays a big part in organizing.

We had 84% participation from the entire city last year (meaning approximately 8,400 of 10,000 residents participated), and we're hoping for as good or better this year. From the hours of 6-8PM we'll be accounting for everyone in the city, practicing radio communication through two separate radio nets, working through 25 emergency scenarios at the city EOC, letting the city council take on council specific responsibilities, and running an hour long CERT mock.

A lot of neighborhoods have block parties, potlucks, and seminars about emergency prep, so it turns into a pretty fun evening for the city.

In addition, every school will do a drill earlier in the day, and we're encouraging Lindon businesses to do the same. We'll have visiting VIPs, independent evaluators, an after action debrief, and other support from the city and county.

The signs are a little saggy in this photo, but we fixed them after I took the pictures. :) This was from our Lindon Days booth on Saturday.

I also went to my first ham radio face-to-face picnic last night, and the guy who ran it (unexpectedly) asked me to talk about the Lindon City Drill. So that was cool. Hopefully we get good amateur radio participation this year.

4 comments:

I read the syllabus, every word of it, AND checked out all parts of the lindoncitydrill site. (I do my homework.)

There is a lot I could say (other than WOW!) but I choose to limit it to this - do you suppose, now that Bridgette has witnessed your blood donation and desired to do it herself, that she will now be very cooperative whenever she is the patient at the doctor's office or in the hospital?

What a girl that Bridgette! If you ask Isabella, Mars is red with a pink sky. We listen to Holst Planets and Aaron has lots of books on space, when they are in the tub they get schooled. :-) Have you played They Might Be Giants Planets song for her? Our favorite part is, and a bunch of other stuff. HA! Charles likes to sing Jupiter like they do in the song.